IPMI blade server event messages

The interface between the advanced management module and the service processor on the blade server is an industry standard called Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI). IPMI defines a standard set of events that can be sent from the service processor to the advanced management module for monitoring the status of the blade server.

The event log strings associated with Event IDs with the high order bit set are dynamically built from standard IPMI events received from the service processors on blade servers. The events received from the blade server are in numerical format and the advanced management module translates the message into text based on the IPMI standard. The AMM event log string for a service processor IPMI event also includes the service processor defined 16-byte Sensor Data Record ID string in parenthesis that describes the sensor record associated with the event.

IPMI-based events add additional information to the message string when the event is displayed:
  • Entity ID. The specific component, such as a bus or a panel.
  • Instance. The unique occurrence of a component. The instance is typically a numbered occurrence of an entity.
  • Sensor Type (for threshold and generic discrete only). An indication of what can be measured by the sensor, such as temperature or memory.
The Event ID for an IPMI-based event can be broken up into 4 bytes:
  • Byte 1 (left most byte) 0x80 – means it is an advanced management module standard IPMI event
  • Byte 2 is the event/readying type code.
  • Byte 3 is the sensor-specific offset
  • Byte 4 is for threshold and generic discrete
For example, consider the event 0x806F010F:
  • 0x80. This is a generic event
  • 6f. The event is sensor specific
  • 01. The sensor-specific offset, which in this case means not running or stopped. The offset is dependent on the sensor type.
  • 0F. The sensor type, which in this case is firmware progress
The resulting error message is:
                  0x806F010F E (Blade Name) System board, firmware progress (Pri FW Status) 
	  		       option ROM hang
Parent topic: Introduction